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Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

medicine.wustl.edu

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Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#81

Post by lamontcg »

raphlinus wrote: post #5

I'm starting to get pretty optimistic. There seem to be a bunch of antivirals with very different mechanisms of action - this one blocks entry of the virus to cells, Molnupiravir fucks up accurate replication of the virus (nucleoside analog), others are protease inhibitors, which are very effective against HIV. There's a caveat, most treatments that look promising don't pan out, but there are a lot in the pipeline an…

Mortality is going to be dramatically reduced once nearly everyone has T-cells+B-cells that recognize the virus. If everyone got vaccinated we'd be out of the pandemic phase and into the endemic phase with a virus that looked more like just a flu/cold.

Vaccines are a 10x or 20x improvement in death and hospitalization rates. That's just a fact. All these antivirals won't have that kind of impact and are closing the barn doors after the horse has escaped. Which is not to say we don't research both, but vaccination is the simple easy and effective answer. There's a considerable technological fetish with antivirals while boring vaccines are now treated with skepticism, which is backwards. Antivirals should be used after vaccines have failed in vulnerable populations, the major weapon against viruses is vaccines, and they work.

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#82

Post by LMYahooTFY »

randomopining wrote: post #77
nekt wrote: post #56

This blocks TMPRSS2 which is the exact protein ivermectin blocks.

Ivermectin doesn't have any legit studies with large samples to show that it's even that useful against covid. Also, what happened to hydroxychloroquine? That was the big thing in 2020. guess 2021 is ivermectin.

Based on what metric?

The vaccines were authorized under emergency use with trial participants comparable to samples conducted with Ivermectin.

How is it not worth considering for a drug that's already known to be safe to administer and cheap?

Beyond that, there are practicing doctors advocating that they've had good results. This should be more than enough to consider it's use, and not dismiss it as some 'thing of the year to dismiss'.

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#83

Post by space_fountain »

LurkingPenguin wrote: post #73
space_fountain wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: My understanding of the science here was at least slightly wrong. Please see the reply from LurkingPenguin and eventually my reply to them I think results like vaccinated individuals “can” have viral loads as high as unvaccinated individuals are next to useless. I need to know how likely I am to have high viral loads and my understanding of the science there is that vaccines still do a decent job of lowering th…

> I think the “vaccinated individuals can have high viral loads” line is particularly bad https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v... https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim... How is a statement about what some researchers are finding "particularly bad"? If vaccinated individuals routinely have viral loads as high as those seen in unvaccinated individuals, it warrants more re…

Welp, this is making me realize I was just wrong. My understanding of the science was something like you can find asymptomatic vaccinated individuals with similar viral loads to asymptomatic unvaccinated people, which is a bit meaningless when you're choosing a threshold for "infected" and when random chance will just see some people at any level. So to be clear it's not that I think the questions shouldn't be investigated, but a statement like "some vaccinated cases have high viral loads" is meaningless to explaining what my risk of spreading covid is.

Trying to avoid the sort of bias that comes from trying to reinforce rather than question existing views, but I do still think the statement "No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant" despite being much more precise is still a bit unintuitive in it's implication. Because essentially what this means right is that they sampled people's viral loads, and then cut out everyone below a value they choose to mean "infected". It's still true that even if I had symptoms because I'm vaccinated my odds of having a high viral load are much lower. Presumably if you didn't remove all the samples with less than some concentration you'd see significant differences.

I think that something the scientists got wrong consistently with covid was not unflinchingly communicating what was likely to be true mostly out of a fear that the public would take interventions that only moderately improved their safety like wearing a mask, and start doing riskier things or because of a bias towards doing nothing when clear evidence didn't exist. It can feel like similar things are happening with vaccination where it does seem pretty clear that getting vaccinated reduces your risk of passing on covid both because you're less likely to ever get a colony of the virus sufficient to count as "infected" and because you're likely to have a shorter infection.

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#84

Post by nekt »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #80
nekt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said ivermectin was not found to block TMPRSS2. I linked a nih study that said it did. Now its about proving its efficacy against sars-cov-2? I believe this is called "moving the goalposts". And there we have it - in silico is fine for this new substance that will likely have a huge price tag. Not fine for an existing generic. Far fewer people are buying this nonsense these days.

For what it's worth, that is not an NIH study; it may be listed on PubMed but it appears to be conducted by researchers at the Integrative Biochemistry & Immunology Laboratory, Department of Animal Science, Kazi Nazrul University. PubMed indexes most biomedical literature, not just research conducted by the NIH. And again, computer simulations suggesting that ivermectin may interact with a specific protein is not the…

Im unsure of what you are trying to say. Are you trying to say ivermectin has no impact on TMPRSS2? Ok here is another the google machine gave me.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7372205/

What is most telling about all of this is that there is no honest discussion. My only initial comment was that this blocks the same protein that ivermectin does. Multiple studies confirm this, its easy to search for them, and it has been the hypothesized mechanism by which ivermectin may show some efficacy.

Does ivermectin block TMPRSS2 or not?

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#85

Post by subsubzero »

mywittyname wrote: post #45
wongarsu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the willingness to get tested would also be a lot higher if the result of a positive test was a reasonably quick antiviral treatment instead of weeks of quarantine. Sure, there will always be sceptics, but for large parts of people, organisations and governments having less perverse incentives might improve things a lot.

I feel like I'm pointing out the obvious, but another, extremely effect and quick "treatment" is vaccination. And it works great without the constant need for testing. I have to imagine that anyone willing to undergo treatment at the very start of getting covid, would have also been willing to be vaccinated. The vaccine-hesitant aren't going to go for treatment until the outlook is dire. Additionally, in my experienc…

I agree, but vaccines in this case have their definite drawbacks as seen in vaccine-heavy Israel in that their effectiveness wears off after a few months.

I have personally heard of a number of pretty bad breakthrough cases where a person has had a fever for almost a month, another was extremely sick and there are still people who are afraid of covid for this very reason(and they are vaccinated). Having an effective anti-viral solution will bring down the fear about these scenarios and get people back to work and bring normalcy to society again.

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#86

Post by wongarsu »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #62
mywittyname wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm pointing out the obvious, but another, extremely effect and quick "treatment" is vaccination. And it works great without the constant need for testing. I have to imagine that anyone willing to undergo treatment at the very start of getting covid, would have also been willing to be vaccinated. The vaccine-hesitant aren't going to go for treatment until the outlook is dire. Additionally, in my experienc…

> The vaccine-hesitant aren't going to go for treatment until the outlook is dire. Many of them seem quite willing to get ivermectin (whether it works or not is another issue). This is a tribal thing: one tribe has determined that the vaccine isn't something their tribe gets, but many of them seem willing to try other treatments that are acceptable to the tribe. (and yes, that's not rational, but humans are often irr…

There's also the perceived seriousness of a treatment. A nasal spray is harmless, a capsule is more substantial, an injection is serious business. You see the same thing with placebos, with saline injections being more "effective" than sugar tablets. And a vaccine is not just an injection, it's some kind of miracle thing that cures an infection you don't even have yet.

It's not surprising people are far more willing to try out sprays and tablets than injections, even if there wasn't any misinformation and tribal politics

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#87

Post by ralusek »

angelzen wrote: post #44
raphlinus wrote: post #5

I'm starting to get pretty optimistic. There seem to be a bunch of antivirals with very different mechanisms of action - this one blocks entry of the virus to cells, Molnupiravir fucks up accurate replication of the virus (nucleoside analog), others are protease inhibitors, which are very effective against HIV. There's a caveat, most treatments that look promising don't pan out, but there are a lot in the pipeline an…

> Molnupiravir [interferes with] accurate replication of the virus At first glance this sound like a really bad idea, given that the #1 concern is future covid mutations.

It specifically causes non-viable mutations. Therefore, the concern isn't currently that it'll cause mutations in the virus and create new strains, but rather that we have to be very confident that it isn't resulting in mutagenicity in mammalian cells.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8136050/

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#88

Post by unanswered »

nekt wrote: post #84
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, that is not an NIH study; it may be listed on PubMed but it appears to be conducted by researchers at the Integrative Biochemistry & Immunology Laboratory, Department of Animal Science, Kazi Nazrul University. PubMed indexes most biomedical literature, not just research conducted by the NIH. And again, computer simulations suggesting that ivermectin may interact with a specific protein is not the…

Im unsure of what you are trying to say. Are you trying to say ivermectin has no impact on TMPRSS2? Ok here is another the google machine gave me. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7372205/ What is most telling about all of this is that there is no honest discussion. My only initial comment was that this blocks the same protein that ivermectin does. Multiple studies confirm this, its easy to search for the…

No, no. You have to give a source! Like CNN, or MotherJones! Until then there's no way to know the truth about whether ivermectin blocks this protein or not. I mean there isn't even really a right answer to that question, until we hear it from reliable sources!

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#89

Post by UncleOxidant »

wongarsu wrote: post #86
UncleOxidant wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The vaccine-hesitant aren't going to go for treatment until the outlook is dire. Many of them seem quite willing to get ivermectin (whether it works or not is another issue). This is a tribal thing: one tribe has determined that the vaccine isn't something their tribe gets, but many of them seem willing to try other treatments that are acceptable to the tribe. (and yes, that's not rational, but humans are often irr…

There's also the perceived seriousness of a treatment. A nasal spray is harmless, a capsule is more substantial, an injection is serious business. You see the same thing with placebos, with saline injections being more "effective" than sugar tablets. And a vaccine is not just an injection, it's some kind of miracle thing that cures an infection you don't even have yet. It's not surprising people are far more willing…

There are nasal covid vaccines in development. I suspect some of the hesitant would take them, but I've talked to anti-vaxxers who still would not even take a nasal vaccine.

Re: Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

#90

Post by mlyle »

beakerbreaker wrote: post #27
gizmo686 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A limiting factor for the effectiveness of anti-virals for Covid is time. Maximum viral load happens often happens before any symptoms are present, and the most severe diseases occurs weeks after infection as a result of the bodies inflammatory response instead of the virus itself. This means that by the time you know that a patient will have severe Covid-19, it is likely too late for any treatment that is based on i…

That's a good point on the limitation, and to expand on your last point, an immediate demographic this could help is frontline healthcare workers and similar jobs who do get routine testing and are at higher risk in general.

Yup.

I'm a teacher and vaccinated. If I found out that I was exposed, and then tested positive... post-exposure prophylaxis sounds great.

Also there's my dad, who has an immune condition due to old age. He's vaccinated, but who knows how effective the vaccine was for him. The existence of PEP could make it possible for him to do more at a similar level of safety... vs. the current option of staying in a small bubble for the rest of his life despite being otherwise able-bodied and capable.

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